Our intended legacy
In schools that serve stateless and refugee children, there is a growing urgency for effective responses to education inequities, as well as new methods of learning and teaching. Policy-makers, schools, non-profits, teachers and employers want to re-design governance, curricula, teaching methods and assessment to provide more relevant and inclusive learning for all children.
Although we have been educating and developing teachers at the University of Birmingham since 1890, the Teachers for Educational Equity project includes our first ever blended programme of study that works internationally with philanthropic organisations and underserved schools.
We are proud of what we achieved in our first year of activity in 2023/24.
We have co-designed, with our partner schools and with the special help of the YTL Foundation, an innovative and experience-based admissions policy that facilitated access to postgraduate study for refugee teachers whose education has been interrupted by forced displacement. Those teachers, and others from across the Klang Valley, and from Perak and Sarwak, studied a programme whose content and pedagogy was designed in consultation with schools.
We drew on best available research evidence to provide 24 hours of face-to-face teaching, 38 hours of online teaching, and to observe teachers in their settings. We formally assessed students ten times and read, and watched, as they put new ideas and new tools to work.
We also began to research what happened in schools as teachers accessed new knowledge and new skills. We are in the process of evaluating the programme and we look forward to delving deeper into the data and narratives we have so that we can draw conclusions about the impact the programme has had.
Yet, while we achieved much in our first year, we know there remains much to do.
Around the globe for example, and in Malaysia too, somewhere between 40 and 60% of refugee children do not complete primary school. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) projects that, by the end of 2024, there will be more than 130 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide. Around 75% of those people live in lower middle-income countries where varying levels of refugee support is provided by a mixture of state authorities, local communities, and humanitarian organisations. In such circumstances access to, and experience of, schooling is widely variable.
For those children that are in school, they will too often experience a curriculum and a pedagogy that has little meaningful impact on their lives. Already facing extreme disadvantage, the poorest children are likely to access schools in which teachers be partially trained or not trained at all; and in which emerging research on inclusive education – on how to meet challenges of disadvantage and how to maximise the opportunities of school – may not be known about or understood.
Our ambition is to build a model of teacher development from the ground up: decolonised, inclusive, sensitive to context and transformative for individuals and communities
Our first three years
During this period we will train circa 180 qualified teachers, who will spend at least two years working in underserved schools. In addition, there will be 25 trained school mentors with leadership skills and capacity to develop new cultures of teacher development in schools, plus 25 school leaders trained in research methods and evaluation who are engaged in research on learning and educational equity.
We will provide compelling evidence of the impact of high-quality, child-centred, relational and inclusive, education on children’s enhanced learning, to support systemic and policy change – globally. We will have innovative research-informed interventions and approaches that have been shown to have a positive impact on educational equity through enhanced educational participation, experiences, and outcomes amongst the most disadvantaged children.
Our Delivery Plan
We will design and deliver a bespoke programme of teacher development, underpinned by research, and engaged in ongoing evidence generation to shape and influence policy. It will be a hybrid programme, combining face-to-face teaching, with online distance learning. It will also provide teacher trainees with a network of mentor support that will be facilitated as part of the programme, and which will be designed to develop capacity for teacher training and development in refugee schools and learning centres.
The design and content of the programme is informed by the best evidence on effective, inclusive and digital learning in middle-income countries and informal education contexts. It is designed to develop those aspects of teacher development that are associated with strong outcomes for their students and that can help shape systemic change and policy reform.
The programme will provide trainee teachers with the skills to: develop and apply effective lesson planning; target instruction to match students’ existing skills level; develop inclusive and relational pedagogic approaches; use learning technologies effectively to meet needs of individual children; enhance the quality of teaching for all age groups, including primary where the most novice teachers are often concentrated; and develop incentives and accountability (UNICEF 2022; World Bank 2020; World Bank, 2018).